Dynabook Portégé X30W-J
Is Sharp’s inherited professional laptop range capable of reaching its potential?
It’s easy to see Toshiba’s legacy in everything from the lightweight metal chassis design to the thin bezel implementation on the Dynabook Portégé X30W-J, but some elements – such as the trackpad – look and feel a little dated in a lineup of 2021 Evo laptops. Sharp still has some honing to do on its adopted Protégé.
Dynabook is claiming its Portégé X30W-J is the lightest 13.3-inch Evo device around, and so far we haven’t seen anything to contradict that; however the slightly larger 14-inch Acer Swift 5 has a better kg-per-inch weight to screen-size ratio. Unfortunately, the Portégé X30W-J’s lightweight materials combined with the mushier than usual keyboard make this device feel a little less premium than its competitors here, but it’s not bad enough to be a deal breaker.
The Portégé X30W-J is one of the few units in this round up to feature Windows 10 Pro, and the model we tested came with an Intel Core i5-1135G7 CPU. With a starting price of around $2,148 when paired with 8GB RAM and 256GB of storage, we’d opt to double the memory and storage offerings for $150 extra or go for the i7, 16GB, 512GB variation for $2,419.
In most tests the i5 Dynabook Portégé X30W-J performed around 10 percent behind the i7 Evo average, but this should still be more than enough for most workflows at roughly the same performance of a 10th Gen i7. With similar relative GPU performance you can still expect to play most games on low 1080p graphical settings and you’ll get eight hours and 26 minutes out of the battery in 1080p movie playback.
A good Evo workhorse for those that care more about convenience than appearances.